In Whitman’s Pocket, an Imagined Lincoln

The librarian wheels out the box on a little wooden trolley that reminds me of a dim-sum cart or a hospital gurney. Inside it is the poet’s notebook, dismembered with surgical care by a long-ago conservator, each leaf pressed between sheets of adhesive silk as if it were a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This private, portable thing is now splayed open, immobilized.

Still, as I sit in the manuscript room at the Library of Congress, turning those pages, it soon becomes easy to imagine them traveling inside Walt Whitman’s coat pocket on the Broadway omnibuses, in Pfaff’s beer cellar or crossing the ferry to Brooklyn. The entries, scribbled hastily in pencil, are a jumble of the immortal and the ephemeral: snatches of verse and strange political visions alongside the name of a patent-medicine brand and the addresses of men and women whom the poet met on his rambles around the city. Here and there are traces of these other hands. One page is filled up with the name “Arthur Henry,” crudely repeated; it is believed that Whitman was teaching a workingman or street tough to write his name. Others – depicted in the slide show accompanying this article – contain mysterious sketches by an unidentified artist.

And in this little book, sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, the writer began an imaginary conversation that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. There has never been another relationship quite like the one Walt Whitman had with Abraham Lincoln. A poet’s job is to speak the truth; a politician’s is … well, not to. Yet almost from the moment Lincoln appeared on the national political stage, something in Whitman responded. Abe Lincoln, Walt Whitman: the metrical rhyme hinted at grander consonances.

Indeed, Whitman had earlier foretold of Lincoln’s emergence, according to Daniel Mark Epstein, author of “Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington.” “He prophesied it as only a poet like Walt Whitman can,” Epstein told me. In 1856, Whitman wrote a political address that he never delivered, and that remained unpublished for the better part of a century. In it he excoriated Northern Democrats who appeased slaveholders, including then-president Franklin Pierce, in shocking terms: “The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States.” But he also said:

I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate.

Four years later, just such a beard-faced boatman was on his way from the West toward the White House. The poet began his dialogue with the president-elect “as in a dream.” In the notebook pages reproduced here – most of which have never before been published in facsimile – Whitman confronts the same political hurricane that Lincoln was facing. And he writes of it in words that would once again prove prophetic.

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Sources: Whitman Notebook #91 (“81 Clerman”), Thomas Biggs Harned Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Edward F. Grier, ed., “Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts”; Ted Genoways, “Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862”; Daniel Mark Epstein, “Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington”; Roy Morris, Jr., “The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War”; Justin Kaplan, “Walt Whitman: A Life”; Jerome Loving, “Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself”; David S. Reynolds, “Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography”; F.O. Matthiessen, “American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman”; Heidi Kathleen Kim, “From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism” (Whitman Quarterly Review, Summer 2006); Sean Meehan, “Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman”; Richard Maurice Buck, “Walt Whitman.”

Online sources: Walt Whitman Archive; The Vault at Pfaff’s; David S. Reynolds, “Lincoln and Whitman” (History Now, December 2005); Kenneth R. Gregg, “Kissed by Lafayette” (History News Network, 2005). The Whitman Archive plans to publish a complete facsimile of the 1860-61 notebook (among others) on its fantastic website sometime in 2011.

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Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.